Pressing Play at SAS 2023
Last week I delivered my first conference paper presentation Pressing Play: Towards a Plorkful Framework for Contemporary Animated Short Film (2023) at the Society for Animation Studies conference 2023 in New Jersey. I wasn’t in New Jersey, I was a home in my office, a point highlighted by the fact that I misjudged the time difference (thanks Microsoft Outlook) and very nearly missed my slot entirely. The irony of Being On Time being an absolutely pivotal rule in my Rules for Plork is not lost on me.
I will put the conference paper up on the blog at some point (once I figure out a sensible place for them to live) but I had a few reflections on the experience.
Presentation as Play
I have put quite a lot of work into the paper presentation as I was quite nervous it being my first foray in publicising my academic work, other than a poster presentation at the Edinburgh College of Art. And work is the operative word here - for even as I play with these ideas, this endeavour felt like labour more than play. That is to be expected, of course - it’s writing an academic paper, not my usual wheelhouse - but what surprised me was how much I struggled to approach it playfully, or gain much pleasure from it. However, I did actively enjoy the process of delivering the paper. Thinking about Korhonen et al’s PLEX framework (Fig.1, 2013), I experienced Challenge (Testing abilities in a demanding task) and Expression (Manifesting oneself creatively), even Humor (Fun, joy, amusement, jokes, gags). Even during the writing period, I experienced Discovery (Finding something new or unknown). According to Lucero et al, I was having playful experiences. But were they, as De Koven wonders about reflection, undeniably, positively playful? They didn’t necessarily feel that way, even afterwards. The part that did feel pleasureable, playful even, was the ‘performance’, being able to inject my personality into my research - Expression and Humor, then, are key to my own playfulness. This is something to be considered as I continue in my practice - not humour just a comedy, but Humor as fun and amusement. When else do I experience these playful experiences? And, perhaps more importantly, how do I support myself in allowing them to manifest?
Fig. 1 - Korhonen et al’s PLEX framework consisting of 22 categories of proposed playful experience
Content
A broader point here about presentation styles in general, but I think what I felt like I was missing somewhat in my SAS presentation was a core, central point, something to hang my theory and context on. In Pressing Play, I talked largely about the crossovers between play and animation, which at the time of submitting an abstract felt central to my research. However, as my research has moved on, I see now that while these crossovers set a foundation and a justification for the importance of plork as a methodology and framework for animation practice research, they aren’t the central point any more. And that’s OK! That’s to be expected, things move on, ideas develop and change. But when writing the presentation, I could feel myself trying to squeeze some of the newer, clearer ideas - and the practice-based results of those ideas - around a paper than I had, essentially, already written. What I perhaps should have done is one of two things: either focussed on the new work more directly; or allowed myself to just have this paper focus on the more foundational work with a loose tie to new ideas. Watching and listening to the other talks, I preferred presentations that focussed on the animation and tied historical, theoretical or contextual concepts to that work rather than ther other way around. This is important, because it sets a structure for how I want the PhD to manifest - at the moment, it has been a lot of theory, with the practice lurking somewhat in the background. The practice needs to be much more definitely - and defiantly - at the fore, demonstrations of work created playfully by being curious, open, seeking joy and fun and pleasure. My presentation, for example, could have focussed on the making of UPUP, tying the conceptual and theoretical threads back to my animation practice, rather than focussing on theory and demonstrating - almost at the last minute - a tiny fraction of the creative work I have produce for the research so far. As such, I think I perhaps need to gather up some of the creative practice I have been undertaking and look at it in one place, almost a literature review of my creative practice so far.
Questions
At the end of my talk, I had two interesting questions, unfortunately both from people who’s names I couldn’t hear thanks to being remote. Both of these questions deserve posts of their own, but while I am reflecting on the experience I wanted to jot down some initial observations. The first question was, in essence, do I consider playfulness and a playful methodology to be an act of resistance?
In an episode of my favourite podcast 99% Invisible, host Roman Mars was in a conversation with his interviewee who described the idea that the world is so fractured and ‘on fire’ that happiness and joy are the “most punk” things you can be right now, an idea shared by the new-punk band Idles in the title of their first album Joy as an act of Resistance (2018), itself a rewording of Toi Dericotte’s poem Joy Is An Act of Resistance (2008). I love this idea, that joy - and by extension, play, playfulness - are almost counter-cultural. As De Koven says, “We have been taught to distrust play...that we are not and should not be playful…that play is childish, immature, destructive” (De Koven 2014, p17) - but, argues Miguel Sicart, “We need play precisely because we need occasional freedom and distance from our conventional understanding of the moral fabric of society” (Sicart 2014, p5). So do I see playfulness as an act of resistance? Yes, I do. I believe that by being playful, we test boundaries, we are curious, we challenge the status quo. The world can be a grey, painful, angry, confusing place that is, literally as well as figuratively, quite often on fire. Assuming that the conditions for playfulness are met (you are safe, you have shelter, the physical world around you is not literally on fire) then playfulness allows us to connect on a level that supercedes all that nonsense. When I sing in the car with my partner, nothing of the other stuff matters. We are resisting the rest of the world.
And this occurs on much more localised scales as well. Teaching at the university we are bound by an inordinate amount of red tape, hoops to jump through, badly-designed online learning environments, academic points of assessment, rising feels, post-pandemic mental health issues, the rising cost of living for both the students and the staff. Playfulness can be an act of resistance against all of that, and against the encroaching idea that play “is seen as compensation, a reward” (Youell 2008, p122) rather than a way of communicating and being in-and-of itself. Demonstrating, supporting and encouraging playfulness through arts pedagogy feels, to me at least, like an act of resistance against ever-more-formal and soulless processes.
The second question I was asked was if you’re not in a playful mood, how do sit down to work playfully? This is a great question. But it’s a question that I think misunderstands playfulness, painting it as a mood. Many theorists believe that playfulness is not so much a mood, as an internal personality trait or characteristic (Cattel 1950, 1979; Meehl, Lykken, Schofield & Tellegen, 1971; Lieberman 1965, 1966). Further, Winnicott suggests the playfulness might demonstrate our True Self - what Gwen Gordon refers to as “our original design” (GORDEN WELLY PLAYED). So, in some ways, the question is the wrong question. Perhaps it is not so much about how you engage you playful self in a specific act, but about how one engages and develops their playfulness over time. And with that comes the kind of structures and foundation that I have previously discussed - understanding your own values, etc. So, if you’re not feeling particularly playful, perhaps you need to go and do something else for a while, something pleasurable that fires up that playful spirit again: “by simply engaging in playful acts, one cultivates playfulness” (Lockwood and O’Connor 2017, p60; Gordon 2014).
This notion of cultivating playfulness is something that I believe will be key to my research. After all, if I’m arguing that plork - playfulness in reagrds to work - is a potential goldmine for animation practice and pedagogy, how can I demonstrate this with out at least proposing some solutions as to how to engage playfulness? I do believe that whilst the work on the foundational, implicit structures end of things is important, there has to be practical, engaging tools for this also.
Conclusions
Presenting Pressing Play at the SAS Conference 2023 was a useful experience for me. Reflecting on the process of writing and delivering the paper helped me think more about the methods I use for writing and delivering papers themselves; not least of all, the parts that I gain the most pleasure from and feel the most playful in. Not only that, but the audience participation in the work helped me expand on some of my ideas. In the future, I believe that much of my research would perhaps be better suited to a workshop format. Like my teaching, this would provide for a more convivial, community-led approach to the research - in essence, we would be able to play together, and discuss the ideas, rather than deliver them as a lecture. That said, perhaps there is also an opportunity for me to use my research as resistance to notion of what a lecture is. And perhaps this is part of what irks me slightly about this paper - that I am discussing playfulness and play in a format that I consider to be, in short, much more work-like.
Food for thought. My next paper delivery is at the University of Edinburgh Learning and Teaching Conference next week, with a paper that directs my research more towards - understandbly - the practice of plorkful animation pedagogy. Having written and re-written the presentation based off my learnings from SAS, I have given myself permission to let go of it now and just present it as is - and perhaps that is one of the big learnings for me too: to put the work in, but then accept the work is done and move on.
REFERENCES
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